Testimony

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For most of my life, I knew how to survive. Childhood trauma taught me how to read a room, keep people happy, carry what needed to be carried, and hide the parts of myself I believed were too broken for anyone else to see. I spent years searching for acceptance, belonging, identity, and relief through relationships, accomplishments, control, perfectionism, and eventually things that helped me escape what I didn't know how to face. God was woven throughout my story long before I truly surrendered my life to Him. I went to church, served, taught, and even worked in ministry, but I eventually learned that knowing things about God and actually knowing Him are two very different things.

Motherhood changed the direction of my life. After years of infertility, I became a mom to Keana, who was born with congenital muscular dystrophy. Loving her, caring for her, and advocating for her eventually led me into special education, disability advocacy, and special needs ministry. Somewhere along the way, being her mother, protector, caregiver, and advocate also became part of my identity. I became very good at being the person everyone needed, which was something I had actually been practicing most of my life.

After my first marriage ended, I returned to church searching for something I couldn't quite name. On April 14, 2013, I finally surrendered my life to Jesus. It wasn't polished or particularly theological. I was desperate, I had questions, and I wasn't completely convinced that God could be trusted, but I surrendered anyway.

Then, on December 13, 2014, Keana passed away at eleven years old following complications from surgery. Losing her changed me forever. I had spent her entire life protecting her, and suddenly I had to release her into the hands of the God I was still learning to trust. I believe Keana received her miracle. It simply wasn't the miracle I wanted on this side of eternity.

Life continued even when I didn't understand how it possibly could. God blessed me with Mackenzie and later Nate. Mackenzie is gifted and was diagnosed with ADHD and Autism Level 1, while Nate was born with Down syndrome and a significant congenital heart defect and was later diagnosed with Autism Level 3. When Nate became critically ill following open-heart surgery at five months old, I found myself standing beside another child's hospital bed knowing I could lose another child. I remember asking those praying with us to simply pray, "Lord, let our will align with Yours." I thought that meant I had learned to completely trust God, but years later I would discover there were still places in me I had never surrendered.

For years I poured myself into caregiving, advocacy, ministry, teaching, and serving. Much of it was good and God absolutely used it, but eventually He showed me that some of it was also striving. I had become very good at taking painful things and finding a purpose for them. I could serve harder, advocate louder, learn more, help someone else, and keep moving. What I hadn't learned was how to stop trying to make something useful out of my pain long enough to let God into all of it.

That began to change in October 2024 when I attended a retreat and felt the Lord ask me, "Do you trust Me with your children?" For the first time, I stopped giving God the answer I thought a faithful Christian was supposed to give and told Him the truth. I didn't. I was still angry that Keana's miracle had not happened here, and I was afraid that fully surrendering Mackenzie and Nate meant accepting that God's will for their lives might not look like mine. Underneath years of ministry, prayer, and service was still a mother who was afraid of what surrender might cost her.

What I discovered was that God already knew all of that. He wasn't shocked by my anger, disappointed by my questions, or waiting for me to say the right Christian words. I was the one who needed to stop hiding. That honesty began a season of surrender, healing, repentance, freedom, and a deeper relationship with Jesus than I had experienced before. God began showing me how much of my life had been shaped by fear, shame, people pleasing, control, striving, and the need to prove that I was okay. I began to understand that I don't have to manufacture purpose from my pain because God already knows how to redeem it.

That realization has changed the way I serve and is at the heart of Limitless Ability and my work in Christian Mental Health Coaching and Mentoring. I don't believe my calling is to fix people. I know what it feels like to experience grief, trauma, caregiving, disability, loss, shame, recovery, and the exhaustion that comes from believing you have to carry everything yourself. My education and professional training give me valuable tools, but I don't sit across from someone believing I have all the answers. I sit beside them believing Jesus does.

My story is still being written. I am still learning, surrendering, healing, and being transformed, but I no longer feel the need to hide the chapters I once believed disqualified me. God has shown me that He wastes nothing, including the wounds, grief, wilderness, failures, and years I spent trying to carry everything myself. What I once carried as shame has become part of my testimony, and if God can meet me in those places, I believe there is hope for your story too.

Limitless Ability. Limitless Purpose. Limitless Hope.